Tag Archives: Edith Wharton

Favorite Author Meme

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Heather at Errant Dreams came up with a wonderful meme–enjoy & consider yourself tagged!

* Answer the questions as you see fit. Although they’re all phrased to ask about a singular author, feel free to respond with multiples, or even a list.
* Where possible & convenient (you don’t have to go as crazy as I did!), include a link here or there to an author’s website, your review of one of their books, or a review that inspired you to try the author(s), so your readers can get more information on anyone that sounds interesting.
* Tag five people and drop by their blogs to let them know you tagged them, or open-tag your readers.
* It would be nice if you included a link back to your tagger.

1. Who’s your all-time favorite author, and why?

I think I would have to say CS Lewis. I’ve read all of his books, many of them several times. I’ve read the Narnia Chronicles at least a dozen times, and books like The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters have meant a lot to me at certain times in my life.

2. Who was your first favorite author, and why? Do you still consider him or her among your favorites?

The first author I remember being obsessed with–as in, I’ve got to read everything by this person–was John Bellairs. He wrote gothic stories for kids illustrated by Edward Gorey that were imaginative and just scary enough, and the first one I read was The House with a Clock in its Walls. I’m saving a few for Superfast Baby when she’s old enough. I had read multiple books by other authors, but I was more into the series, than the author, as with the All of a Kind Family books.

3. Who’s the most recent addition to your list of favorite authors, and why?

Robin Hobb, without question. She’s a superlative storyteller and I just lost myself in love starting with Assassin’s Apprentice. I’d also add Leo Tolstoy and Jhumpa Lahiri to the list, having read both of them for the first time in 2007.

4. If someone asked you who your favorite authors were right now, which authors would first pop out of your mouth? Are there any you’d add on a moment of further reflection?

Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen King, Madeleine L’Engle, CS Lewis, Robin Hobb, George RR Martin, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Dickens, Kathleen Norris, Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Dan Allender, Edith Wharton, Jhumpa Lahiri.

Nothing really to add on further reflection. I spend a lot of time thinking about my favorite authors!

The Alphabet Meme

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Picked this meme up from Melanie, in honor of two YA books I read for work this weekend.

The goal of this is to list favourite authors according to last name (with a representative fave book as well).

Atwood, Margaret — Cat’s Eye
Bronte, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Card, Orson Scott — Ender’s Game
Dragonwagon, Crescent — The Year It Rained (with Paul Zindel)
Eager, Edward — Half Magic
Forster, EM — Howard’s End
Gibson, William — Neuromancer
Hobb, Robin — Ship of Magic
Ishiguro, Kazuo — And Never Let Me Go
Jackson, Shirley — Hangsaman
King, Stephen — The Gunslinger
Lewis, CS — Till We Have Faces
Martin, George RR — Game of Thrones
Novik, Naomi — His Majesty’s Dragon
Oates, Joyce Carol — Blonde
Percy, Walker — The Last Gentleman
Queenan, Joe — If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble
Rendell, Ruth — Judgment in Stone
Smith, Wesley — Culture of Death
Tolkien, JRR — The Return of the King
Undset, Sigrid — Kristin Lavransdatter
Vine, Barbara — A Dark-Adapted Eye
Wharton, Edith — Twilight Sleep
X — I’ll read the next book someone recommends by an author whose last name starts with X.
Yancey, Phillip — Where is God When It Hurts?
Zarr, Sara — Story of a Girl

May I Introduce… (Booking Through Thursday)

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  • btt button
    1. How did you come across your favorite author(s)? Recommended by a friend? Stumbled across at a bookstore? A book given to you as a gift?
    2. Was it love at first sight? Or did the love affair evolve over a long acquaintance?

    You can find my favorite authors listed in the first sidebar column. Here’s a rundown of how I met them all:

    • CS Lewis–My father read the Chronicles of Narnia to me when was a little girl. For my 6th birthday, I had a cake featuring the old cover art from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In college, I attended a two-week symposium in Cambridge, England, sponsored by the CS Lewis Institute, and that’s where I fell in love with his non-fiction.
    • Edith Wharton–I hated Ethan Frome, but fell in lover with Age of Innocence in college. I tore through the rest of her books. Still don’t like Ethan Frome, though.
    • Flannery O’Connor love came from reading Wise Blood in high school.
    • Jane Austen–now that’s an interesting case. I had to read Pride and Prejudice in ninth grade and hated it. Just a few years ago, I decided to give her another chance, and read Sense and Sensibility. I adored it, and adored all the rest of her books… including Pride and Prejudice.
    • JRR Tolkien love grew from a lifelong adoration of Middle Earth from reading The Hobbit and watching the animated movies. On that same trip to Cambridge, I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time and my passion was sealed.
    • Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, and Barbara Vine were library reads. I had heard good things about them, and decided to take a chance.
    • Shirley Jackson I picked up while working in development for a film producer. We were looking for material and somebody suggested I check out her work. Ah, me! One taste and I was lost. I found a book scout in Canada who tracked down all her out of print books for me.
    • Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising was assigned reading in sixth grade. I immediately got my hands on the rest of the series, and have since reread it several times. I can’t wait to introduce them to Bean.
    • Walker Percy was yet another author I discovered in Cambridge. I read Lost in the Cosmos, then his fiction, then the rest of his non-fiction essays on semiotics. He played a big part in forming my identity in my early 20s.

    You may also notice I have a list of Author Sites I Love. Here’s how I met those folks:

    • Dan Allender was thanks to counseling with a former pastor.
    • David Bordwell from a grad school course on film narrative.
    • George RR Martin was a recommendation from my best friend from college.
    • Jeffrey Overstreet is a great blogger.
    • Laurie Halse Anderson wrote Speak, and there’s a whole story about me and that book that I’ll save for another day.
    • Libba Bray was recommended to me by an eighth grader at my old high school. I did a speaking engagement, and this girl was my mini-me–frizzy hair, socially awkward, and a huge bookworm.
    • Madeleine L’Engle I’ve blogged about before, in a post on books that evoked a strong emotional reaction in me.
    • Robin Hobb was a recommendation from the girlfriend of a college friend of my husband’s. This guy teases Melissa for reading what he calls “vampires in space” books. My husband likes to say, “How can you write a book about a dragon?” She and I hit it off immediately.
    • Save the Cat! is the site of a recent book on screenwriting that my manager made me read. I wish I had read it ages ago… it really does live up to its own hype.
    • Scott Westerfeld was discovered by me during a search to find young adult books that would make great movies. The Uglies series is being made into a movie, though not with me.
    • Stephen King saved my life freshman year in college, before I made friends and a life. I whiled away many a long boring night with one of his gazillions of books, checked out of the library.
    • T. Greenwood’s book Nearer than the Sky is quite special to me. A friend and I have an option on it and hope to turn it into a movie.

    And there you have it–wow, it’s amazing what I can do while the baby takes a nap!

    • 100 Most Influential Books by Women

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    Via BookGal–I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.

    1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
    2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
    3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
    4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
    5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
    6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
    7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
    8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
    9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
    10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
    11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
    12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
    13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
    14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
    15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
    16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
    17. Erica Jong, Fanny
    18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
    19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
    20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
    21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
    22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
    23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
    24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
    25. Lore Segal, Her First American
    26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
    27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
    28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
    29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
    30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
    31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
    32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
    33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
    34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
    35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
    36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife
    37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
    38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
    39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
    40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
    41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
    42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
    43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
    44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
    45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
    47. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
    48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
    49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
    50. Toni Morrison, Beloved
    51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
    52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
    53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
    54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
    55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
    56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
    57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
    58. A.S. Byatt, Possession
    59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
    60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
    61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
    62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
    63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
    64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
    65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
    66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
    67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
    68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
    69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
    70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
    71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
    72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
    73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
    74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
    75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
    76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
    77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
    78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
    79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
    80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
    81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
    82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
    83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
    84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
    85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
    86. Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
    87. Margaret Drabble, Realms of Gold
    88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
    89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
    90. Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
    91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
    92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (I just reviewed this one!)
    93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
    94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
    95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
    97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
    98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
    99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
    100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater

    Umm… no Jane Austen?

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    Answers–13 Opening Lines–How Many Can You Guess?

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    I mentioned that I had to go on maternity leave for my reading jobs, so my On Reading posts will no longer mean that I read a book for work. I could be a stickler for consistency and just stop doing them, but they’re just too much fun–especially when I catch the fever for a really great meme like the one accidentally started by the Accidental Novelist, and picked up by Poodlerat.

    Here are 13 opening lines (or two) to books that are beloved by me, the Superfast Reader. See if you can guess where they come from. I’ll update the post with the answers as the correct ones come in. Continue reading →

    Story vs. Language

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    From my shared items (available in the top left corner of the blog, as well as by RSS), I thought I’d highlight this post from the Guardian. It opens: Continue reading →

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